Putin & the Perils of Believing Your Own B.S.
Putin isn't being "misinformed." Rather he's a victim of his own fabulism and overweening hubris.
Do you ever believe in your own b.s?
I’m not getting promotions and raises — It’s the fault of those damn feckless fools who run the company who feel insecure with my superior performance.
I’m very attractive, poised and smart. So, why aren’t members of the opposite sex making a bee line for me? — Why, they’re all losers, that’s why.
I started this business that will take on Amazon in a few years. Yeah, I’m going bankrupt. — But…but my product is premature. The market will eventually catch up…
Vladimir Putin’s own delusional thinking these days goes something like this: “My genius will be recognized by future historians. Incompetents under me and enemies without are sabotaging my great goals for Mother Russia. But I’m a lean, mean son of a bitch. I’ll prevail in the end even if it means turning Ukraine into a heap of ashes.”
The received wisdom among news pundits this week posits that Russia’s leader just isn’t getting the truth handed to him by his advisors. Fear, c.y.a., self-dealing and sycophancy keep Russia’s spies, diplomats and military men from confronting Putin with actual facts of military failures, from pre-invasion planning to the current debacle on the ground. Why, if he’d only gotten the facts, he might’ve avoided this mess.
“We would concur with the conclusion that Mr. Putin has not been fully informed by his Ministry of Defense, at every turn over the last month,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said. “Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth,” stated White House Communications Director, Kate Bedingfield.
I don’t buy it. George Orwell nailed guys like Putin: “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
A strongman in power for 22 years and counting, who has neutered political opposition, cowed the news media and bent the political structure to his will, Putin believes he’s the smartest guy in all the Russias, a rare seer with a holy vision for his nation, a clever tactician and strategist who has checkmated the West repeatedly in victory after victory. Of course, it’s all b.s. (with the exception of his indeed having outmaneuvered the West in some areas).
The thing about long-serving autocrats is that they become increasingly detached from not only the truth but also from being able to tolerate criticism. Look at the way Putin humiliated his senior national security staff before cameras. They literally trembled like school kids called before the headmaster. And those 30-foot tables are physical manifestations of his distance from reality.
His people could be loading dumpsters of unvarnished truth into his inbox daily and it would make no difference. To guys like Putin it’s, “Don’t bother me with the facts. My mind is made up.” Alone in his Kremlin redoubt, he inhabits a Disneyesque “Putin World,” a reincarnated black-belted, shirtless Rurik living the myths and legends of days of yore.
History is replete with examples of self-deluded leaders who couldn’t be bothered with facts and ended up paying a price for their denial.
Hitler repeatedly ignored reports by his staff that occupying newly conquered Soviet republics would prove to be an economic drain for Germany. Stalin disregarded Soviet intelligence reports specifying the exact, or nearly exact, date of the Nazi invasion no fewer than 47 times in the 10 days before “Operation Barbarossa” was launched. U.S. policymakers dismissed reports from its diplomats, the so-called “China Hands,” that Mao Zedong had the support of the Chinese people and would most likely win power. These selfless diplomats were purged for their efforts. Lyndon Johnson and the American policy establishment stubbornly held onto the “domino theory” as a basis for intervening in Vietnam. George W. Bush pursued the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade Iraq. It’s a miracle that the chronically mendacious Donald Trump, who viewed the U.S. intelligence community as Enemy #1, didn’t blunder into a war.
No. Sorry. Putin, a career intelligence officer, knows what’s going on. His blunders are not attributable to “not being fully informed,” but rather to his own hubris and cynical fabulizing. He seeks to create his own truth by denying Ukrainian identity and history and justifying genocide based on fabrications and lies. He fully grasps another Orwellism: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Putin knows fully what he’s doing.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.